Merging the shooter with additional unit control and battlefield tactics found a home in squad-based tactical shooters.

I think you need a good reason to merge two different interfaces (overhead and TPS) into a single experience or you'll find yourself searching to create a reason during the design process. At that point, it might feel like the design process is going backwards. Seems to me like the merging of both interfaces should have originally surfaced as a radical solution to an experimental design challenge. But right now it appears to be, basically, a very difficult starting point for beginning the design process.

Have you considered having the strategy part as a background command task? You could play mainly in TPS mode controlling the commander's every move. Holding a key down displays a semi-transparent map with an RTS interface to command the squads with a mouse. Since there are so few squads to control at a time performing the commands shouldn't take too much time.

Don't know whether you ever played "Rise and Fall", but it does the 3rd person thing too.
You actually play an RTS, but can swith into a 3rd person control scheme at any time (given you have enough of certain points if I remember correctly)

That is generally a lot of fun.
As far as loosing track of the rest of your army is concerned I wouldn't be too afraid of it. You could for example implement some kind of direct commands from your hero/main character. In Rise and Fall you can for example issue "follow me",
"wait here" or "attack" commands. And as you can switch at any time there's still enough space for tactics.

One thing that needs further consideration is how powerful you want to make your hero compared to usual units. In Rise and Fall a hero can kill almost any unit with one strike. That might be necessary from a balancing point of view, but destroys quite a lot of the atmosphere. So it would certainly depend on how many units are allowed per map, how long you want the matches to last etc.

One thing I do know is that this kind of gameplay is generally quite a lot of fun in multiplayer :)

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Original post by Chocolate Milk Merging the shooter with additional unit control and battlefield tactics found a home in squad-based tactical shooters.

Anything useful I can learn from these squad-based tactical shooters? Or better yet, could you list a few of them that might be good to look at? [smile]

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Original post by Chocolate Milk Seems to me like the merging of both interfaces should have originally surfaced as a radical solution to an experimental design challenge. But right now it appears to be, basically, a very difficult starting point for beginning the design process.

In this case, the design is actually fairly mature; it's the interface that needs hashing out. The actual gameplay as described in my original post is the basis of the game. The interface just exposes those concepts in a hopefully intuitive way. But you have a point, I do need to make sure that the design doesn't get sidetracked by the interface.

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Original post by rakketh Have you considered having the strategy part as a background command task? You could play mainly in TPS mode controlling the commander's every move. Holding a key down displays a semi-transparent map with an RTS interface to command the squads with a mouse. Since there are so few squads to control at a time performing the commands shouldn't take too much time.

After reading through this thread, I have. [smile] I'm actually envisioning something very similar to what you're talking about. But instead of a full-blown map, I cut it down to a simple menu that allows the player to manage the squads. The player holds down shift to open the squad menu and taps a number key (1-6) to select a squad. He can then left-click to reinforce the squad with an added unit, middle-click to change the squad's stance, or right-click to upgrade the squad. Movement and attack commands are still given directly in the third person view, using the system I mentioned earlier.

I apologize for being presumptious. I recall you saying that their is an RTS view, but then you said that unit control is done in TPS view (perhaps a modified TPS view?). That clashed when you mention controlling units while the commander is dead.

Right now the features of your game sound cool but I don't really get an idea of the gameplay. I think a good step is making the unit control so basic that you give orders on the fly. It's either TPS or its RTS.

btw people, I thought end war was a huge blunder? When I played it, it felt unique but for the worse. Sure it was innovated, but no more innovated as say, star wars galactic battlegrounds. I wonder how great the game when pros are playing each other.

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Original post by Chocolate Milk ...you said that unit control is done in TPS view (perhaps a modified TPS view?). That clashed when you mention controlling units while the commander is dead.

In my original idea, the player was able to do unit control in TPS and RTS views, with the RTS view allowing more advanced control. So when the commander dies, the game automagically switches to RTS view.

But now I'm rethinking the interface based on the feedback from this thread. I'm thinking about making the whole game in third-person view, with the camera sufficiently backed up from the commander to get a good view. Attack and movement commands would be given in TPS, and reinforcements and upgrades would happen in the pop-up menu I described in my last post. That means when the commander dies, the player just waits until he can afford a new commander (which would be relatively cheap).